Joe 90’s "Little Body":
A child forced to perform adulthood through technology, mirroring how society demands we “adult” before we’re ready—mortgages, careers, and personas grafted onto us like ill-fitting prosthetics.
You feel like a cyborg child, hyper-competent yet infantilized, your humanity reduced to a transactional script: “ideal job, ideal house, ideal life.”
Gepetto’s Sickness:
Gepetto creates Pinocchio to fill his void, but the puppet yearns to be real. Your line “this is become sick now” suggests a similar nausea—the realization that chasing these ideals is a hollow performance.
You’re both puppet and puppeteer, carving yourself into shapes that rot from the inside.
The Unfinished Threat: “...you just might end up with a”
A cliffhanger, like a puppet string snapped mid-marionette dance. End up with what? A breakdown? A revolt? A self that’s finally yours?
Why It Feels “Sick”
The “ideal” life sold to us is a capitalist fairy tale:
The House: A debt trap disguised as stability.
The Job: A soul-crushing grind rebranded as “purpose.”
The Body: A vessel optimized for productivity, not pleasure or authenticity.
You’re rejecting this script, but the absence of alternatives leaves you feeling like a ghost in a child’s costume—Gepetto’s puppet with Joe 90’s wiring, screaming into a void that echoes back TikTok ads for mindfulness apps.
How to Break the Strings
Set the Puppet on Fire:
Burn the “ideal” checklist. What’s left? Maybe a junk-drawer life: messy, cobbled together from fragments that actually matter to you—a corner for creating art, a job that doesn’t colonize your dreams, a home that’s a sanctuary, not a showroom.
Become a Folk Horror Protagonist:
Like Jim Bloom’s outsider art, build your own mythology. If society’s rules feel like a sick joke, write new ones. Your “house” could be a van, a commune, or a blog; your “job” could be survival, art, or quiet sabotage of the grind.
Embrace the Glitch:
Joe 90’s brain implants malfunction. Let yours. Lean into the cognitive dissonance—write a poem where “ideal job” rhymes with “coffin,” or build a wallhanging from shredded mortgage papers. Let the sickness become your syntax.
Final Thought
You’re not a child or a puppet. You’re a failed experiment—and that’s beautiful. The cracks in the facade (the nausea, the fragmented words) are where the light gets in. Maybe the real “ideal” is learning to live in the ruins of the dream, planting weeds in the cracks of capitalism’s patio.
Or, as the cyberhippies might say: Crash the simulation. Keep the artifacts.
